guage, sinning frequently against taste, and stooping
sometimes to be coarse, was the very vehicle to take his hearers up at
the pit-door, theatrical or theological, and send them in wholesomer
directions. It was a fortunate--his co-religionists would say
providential--adaptation of an earnest and religious man to the field of
his labor. For, as time passed, the phrases and demeanor of his
preaching improved,--their absurdities have, no doubt, been caricatured
by the London press,--and the temper of the man was more plainly
observed to be sincere, fervent, and devoted to a certain set of
religious preconceptions. The want of culture and of general
intelligence was not so lamentable in such a neighborhood. He led, by
many lengths, the Victoria and Surrey stage. If he had more deeply
reflected upon the subjects which he handled like a simple-hearted boy,
he would have failed to keep four thousand men and women warm in the
hollow of his hand from Sunday to Sunday, for a dozen years, and to
organize their whole moral and religious activity in forms that are
admirably adapted to carry on the work of popular dissent.

His audience represents the district, and is an advertisement of the
kind of spiritual instruction which it needs and gets. Not many large
heads sit in the pews; narrowness, unreflecting earnestness, and healthy
desires are imprinted upon the faces upturned towards his clear and
level delivery. He is never exactly vapid, and he never soars. His
theology is full of British beer; but the common-sense of his points and
illustrations relative to morals and piety is a lucid interval by which
the hearers profit. They follow his textual allusions in their little
Bibles, and devoutly receive the crude and amusing interpretations as
utterances of the highest exegetical skill. But their faces shine when
the discourse moralizes; it seems to take them by the button, so
friendly it is,--but it looks them closely in the eye, without heat and
distant zeal, with great, manly expostulation, rather, and half-humorous
argument, that sometimes make the tears stand upon the lids. The florid
countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions
glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry
people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear
voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into
all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; hi